Susan Barba’s ‘Fair Sun’ Wins Anahid Literary Award

NEW YORK—Susan Barba’s book of poems Fair Sun has won the Anahid Literary Award.

Susan Barba

The prize is awarded to the best literary work in English by a young writer of Armenian descent, and is awarded by the Columbia Armenian Center and made possible by a generous gift from an anonymous donor.

Barba was born in New Jersey and educated at Dartmouth College. She earned an MFA from Boston University, and a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University. Her first book of poems Fair Sun was published in 2017 by David R. Godine Publishers. She is also a co-editor of I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian (2005).

Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Hudson ReviewThe Yale ReviewAntioch Review, Raritan, and other journals, and her translations from Armenian have appeared in Words Without Borders and Ararat. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and she is a senior editor for New York Review Books.

The award was founded in 1988 by an anonymous donor who wanted to encourage young writers of Armenian descent and who believed in the importance of literature for the wider culture. Previous recipients of the award include Laura Kalpakian, Eric Bogosian, Atom Egoyan, Diana Der Hovanessian, Michael Zadoorian, and Lydia Peele.

Award committee members, comprised of previous winners, are Peter Balakian, Aris Janigian, Patricia Sarafian Ward, and Micheline Marcom.  The Armenian Center at Columbia will announce an evening prize ceremony sometime in the spring of 2019.

 

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2 Comments

  1. My heartfelt congratulations to Susan for this well deserved award. I take pride of knowing her ad her family, but more importantly, of having read “Fair Sun” and written about it in appreciation of her sensitive and conscious handling of the Armenian, in this case her own ancestral tragic past. I wish her a bright and productive journey through the difficult but rewarding road of Armenian-American poetry.

  2. Congratulations. i look forward to reading her anthology. Is Susan related to Harry Barba, whom i wrote about in FORGOTTEN BREAD???

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